“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.”

dakhma (dokhma) /DOK-ma/. noun. A raised circular structure, or tower, upon which Zoroastrians place the bodies of their dead to be consumed by vultures. AKA a “Tower of Silence.” From Persian dakhmak (funeral place).[Read more…]

Kurt Vonnegut’s only play—Happy Birthday, Wanda June—is underrated. It’s funny and full of outrage. And despite not being much of an opera listener, I’m intrigued by the idea of the Indianapolis Opera adaptation. Among other videos at the link, this ►workshop performance clip. [Thanks, Reader J.]

Today in 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deploys the National Guard to intimidate the “Little Rock Nine”—nine black students scheduled to enter the all-white Little Rock Central High School—and support the protesting segregationists. I wish this sounded more outlandish. The action, and the polarizing photos, would lead to fiery national debate in what became a seminal moment in the history of the civil rights movement. Coincidentally, on this same day in 1908, novelist, essayist and poet Richard Wright was born just outside Natchez, Mississippi. Wright’s work, including the powerful novels Native Son and The Outsider, would be a significant force in race relations and civil rights in the United States and, after his permanent move to France, around the world.